I agree 1000000% with this. Light duty pickups are amazing.

Nissan used to have a light duty pickup everywhere, even the US, called the NP300 Hardbody that slowly morphed into the bloated “Navara” - except for South Africa. Nissan used to have this very Africa-appropriate tiny light duty truck, the Champ. Stellar vehicle. They made the same exact model from 1971 to 2008, and then replaced it with the Nissan NP300 Hardbody. Both are solid metal deathtraps, can be fixed with wire and string, but they’re donkeys as well. Modestly sized and will just go forward (not too fast!) forever. Nissan never stopped making a light duty pickup because the Africa market demands it - something cheap and simple that carries and goes. No frills, not even good for a drive more than 4 hours because the seats are terrible.

And don’t get me started on the way Toyota ruined the Hilux. The only entity in the known universe that could destroy a Hilux was Toyota itself. Damn shame.

Everyone driving these giant monsters wouldn’t know a good economical work vehicle if it drove up to them and dumped a cubic meter of sand on them.

No misconceptions - it’s a word that has more than one meaning, especially in this context. That’s why I said I was unsure which version you meant. I’m not attacking you or doubting you, there’s just not enough information here. Not just about what you mean, but also to ensure you have fundamentals reasonably covered to the point where worrying about where Signal’s servers are should be a sticking point for you.

Free as in no money needed to install? Free as in freedom from proprietary software? Free as in free from specific geographic snooping? Free from centralization under a single entity? When the start and end of FOSS are “Free” and “Software,” I am free as well to see 2 words next to each other and understand there’s ambiguity left to sort out and just ask what you mean. Seems like you mean all of those things - correct me if that’s not accurate.

I’m also not having a disagreement with you, at least not that I’m aware of. I’m trying to get you to take a step back and see if your concerns really bare themselves out, and if the balance you note in the title is actually a search for balance at all. Your post title is about balancing convenience and privacy, but the point of the post is to just ask “What is an E2EE messaging app that doesn’t touch any equipment in the US?” Which is an entirely different question.

Also, there’s no balance if you have a “spyware phone” and find some unicorn app that uses quantum entanglement to send the messages if your keyboard on that spyware phone is giving up what you’re typing anyway. Which is a very real possibility and I’m not seeing indication or not that you’re using non-default keyboards. Or even what phone you’re using as we might say “spyware” but what and how deep Apple and Google track users are fairly different. Balance can’t be found if a vulnerability undoes all your security improvements. If I have a rootkit on my laptop, virus scans of incoming PDFs doesn’t undo the rootkit, right?

Also, if you’re on Android do you have Whatapp sandboxed in a separate profile? If not, then you’re already giving up enough that Signal’s servers are the least of your concerns. Anything that you do where that’s a concern shouldn’t be done on your phone in the first place. Your device isn’t trustworthy enough, and changing one app isn’t going to fix that. And that’s OK - my phone does things I can’t change and so I have to ultimately just know that it’s rated for no conversation more sensitive than what’s for dinner and what time do we meet for someone’s birthday. It’s something I just have to accept.

Look, you’re asking for help and I’m trying to provide some based on partial information. So you can either help us all in this community with information to help you, or not and come away frustrated and angry with no results.

OK, so based on what you’ve posted here I think you might have a lot of misconceptions about what works and what doesn’t and what’s “good” and what isn’t. It’s not even clear what you mean by “Free.” I assume this means FOSS, but it’s hard to tell.

Edit: Speaking of Signal - it is FOSS, it’s the equipment that the network uses that isn’t because someone has to take care of it. That’s how every FOSS project works. You can, if you like, fork your own version of Signal if there’s something about you don’t like. But the thing about E2EE is that once the message leaves your device, it’s encrypted, so worrying about server location isn’t worth it. Otherwise go see what ISIS or Russia uses and go use that. Remember how they all used Telegram, which wasn’t secure at all and the EU is about to try and pass a law making Signal and other E2EE positions illegal because they can’t see the messages?

This is a much larger conversation, but I would expect that you’re placing far too much emphasis on big-picture labels and geography without understanding where nuance exists that might make something worth using. So you’re possibly trying to balance very unbalanced notions.

Not really - have you looked at the F-droid shop? I use Heliboard and Simple keyboard on android which are both FOSS and cover all my language needs. Neither is spyware as far as anyone seems to know.

Negative, I am a meat popsicle.

I get you, but my friend, the guy that started Signal gave up $850 million from Meta to go start Signal.

What’s more likely is your phone to get spyware on it that renders any E2EE worthless, regardless of what app you use.

Thanks for your response. I have a little corner of the internet with a couple projects that require full access to the HTML for the site, so neocities of all things works great. I tried wordpress first, and I just couldn’t get something I wanted worked out. For a blog, I’ve used it before. Blogs I’m kind of wavering about.

Friendica seems great and then…I can’t find anything. I actually did find a Lemmy.world group on there that for some reason I couldn’t see when searching globally for communities by the same name, so it did help me with Lemmy’s jankiness… but for example looking for anyone I might possibly know (unlikely) seems to get me nothing close. I’ll give misskey a look, I checked it out a while ago but was a Fediverse newb.

Short of being a proficient and innovative coder (which I am not), is there any way to help the Fediverse not suck like this?

It’s Lemmy. There are literally dozens of us!

“It’s for the children! No more crosswalks! Just frogger it, kids!” -Ron DeSantis

That’s cool - send her a password protected zip file and bring in a copy of the password on paper: “EmailIsInsecureByDesignThisIsNotHIPPACompliant123!”

Hey! Ok, so they had 2 decent employees. Cool, good to know.

And I get it, both it’s a paycheck and you’re just a well-paid cog in the machine. It’s the tragedy of the commons. They’re not the one making bots post AI slop or exploiting my data, so it’s not on them. But I expect that it’s a touchy place to say they work sometimes. But by working there they let other people do their jobs to help other people do their jobs to enable decisions like all the stuff that’s enshittifying everything. Such is life, sometimes.

Atta boy!

Holy Lemon Fart, Batman! That’s a great anagram!

JFC, this needs a NSFW tag! That thing on the left is hideous steeped in so much hate!

No. Even if had ever wanted to, when I’ve needed to hire someone the baseline of competency and was such that we were happy to have the most qualified person be willing to take lower pay than they probably deserved as it was all we could afford. It’s hard to present a legitimate reason to hire a candidate that’s genuinely less qualified that someone else unless they’re just waaay over qualified.

Plus, the guy was way wrapped up in financing stuff, which just attracts other money-grubbing people anyway. Same with Harvey Weinstein, where they use the money and cloud of flies buzzing around them as the cover if they get caught. They use the ones that didn’t know about their crimes as protection. Fully disgusting, but such is the thrall of money I suppose.

My only surprise comes from Meta once having a single decent employee.

yeah, I checked it out a few months ago and it was…sparse. I’ll give it another go around. The hard part about replacing IG is that the only things I like on IG are cooking and cat related, but my spouse and 1 friend send things basically every day.

Thanks - I was looking at it the other day. I have a few other project ideas that might be better for Ghost and peertube, but that’s a longer-term project.

Yeah!

…wait